About

The New Silk Road Monitor explores the commerce, cultures, markets, and geopolitics of the New Silk Road, across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and beyond, covering everything from Bollywood to Bond Markets. The Monitor takes an expansive definition of the New Silk Road that encompasses Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America — home to 85% of the world’s population — and believes that the recent acceleration and flourishing of trade, investment, and cultural exchange across this 85% of the world’s population represents a transformative moment in world history. The Monitor also believes in the importance of covering how the key ideas, trends and economies shape societies and individual lives.

The Monitor aims to be a hub that chronicles and explores subjects ranging from the car-hailing wars in Southeast Asia to trends in shipping patterns across the Indian Ocean to the rise of Turkish soap operas in Latin America to the shifting geopolitics of the Middle East and, of course, the twists and turns of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The Monitor is led by Afshin Molavi, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, who first wrote publicly about the New Silk Road more than a decade ago in The Washington Post, and has been observing the story since his first job twenty five years ago as a cub business reporter based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he covered trade delegations from South Korea, Japan, China, and East Africa and saw the first seeds of the New Silk Road sprouting, long before it became part of the global conversation. Molavi is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, where he writes on the intersections between China, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East and North Africa region.

Molavi is the blog’s primary author, though he will rely on friends and colleagues from Shanghai to Mumbai to Dubai and beyond to contribute to the conversation.